October 28, 1945

Stuart Little: Or New York Through the Eyes of a Mouse

Reviewed by MALCOLM COWLEY

lthough Mr. and Mrs. Frederick C. Little were normal persons in every way, their second son looked very much like a mouse. Stuart, as they
named him, had a mouse's sharp nose, a mouse's whiskers and a mouse's tail. At birth he was so small that a three-cent stamp would have carried him anywhere in the United States. At the age of 7, when he was fully grown,
he weighed three and one-half ounces and was a little more than two inches tall, not counting the tail. He wore a gray hat and twirled a little cane.

In his pleasant, mouselike manner, shy but inquisitive, he was always getting into scrapes. Once he tried to do gymnastics on the cord that hung from the window blind, to impress the household cat. The blind rolled up and Stuart was imprisoned
there all morning. Once he tried to go skating in Central Park; but a dog chased him, and he had to hide in a celery grove on top of a garbage can. The can was emptied into a truck, the truck was emptied into a scow, and Stuart was
carried out to sea. He would have drowned that time, except for a friend of his, a little wrenlike bird named Margalo, who let him cling to her feet and carried him back to his own window sill.

When Margalo flew away to the north the following spring, Stuart went searching for her in a toy automobile with a real engine. He would drive into a filing station and say, "Five, please."

"Five what?" the attendant would ask, looking down at the car not half so big as a scooter.

"Five drops," Stuart would answer in a firm if squeaky voice.

"Better look at the oil, too," he would say before riding off to look for a brownish bird, in much the same spirit as Galahad seeking the Grail.

Little Stuart is a very engaging hero, and "Stuart Little" is an entertaining book, whether for children or their parents. If I also found it a little disappointing, perhaps that is because I had been expecting that E. B. White
would write nothing less than a children's classic. He has all the required talents, including a gift for making himself understood. He never condescends to his readers: if they happen to be younger than the audience he reaches
through The New Yorker, he merely takes more pains to explain his story. Style is even more important in children's books than in those for adults, because one often reads aloud to children, and a bad style wearies the reader,
not to mention what it does to the listeners. Within his own range of effects, Mr. White has the best style of any American author: clear, unhackneyed and never tying the tongue into knots.

He has, moreover, a talent for making big things small and homely, as if he saw the world distinctly through the wrong end of a telescope; or as if--to change the figure--he took his readers down the rabbit hole and showed them the bottle
that Alice found there, the little bottle with "Drink Me" printed on the label. The liquid in the bottle had a sort of mixed flavor of cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffy and hot buttered toast; and when
Alice drank it, she began shrinking until she was only ten inches high, so that she could look through a tiny door into the loveliest garden you ever saw. But the garden Mr. White describes in his essays is the world as a whole, and
the effect of smallness is deceptive--just as the effect of bigness is deceptive in the authors who imitate Walt Whitman; they describe a world that is really bare and simple, whereas Mr. White's world merely gives, through art,
the effect of simplicity.

With this combination of talents in the author, one has high hopes for the book, and Mr. White doesn't always let us down. His dialogue is good from beginning to end. Each of the separate episodes is entertaining, and one at least
is uproarious--I mean the boat race in Central Park with Stuart braving the storm at the wheel of a toy yacht. The day he spends as school teacher is an effective fable about the San Francisco Conference: "Nix on swiping anything"
and "Absolutely no being mean" are the two fundamental laws he proposes for a world organization, and I doubt that our statesmen could improve on them.

But the parts of "Stuart Little" are greater than the whole, and the book doesn't hold to the same mood or move in a straight line. There are loose ends in the story, of the sort that make children ask, "What happened
then?"--and this time there isn't any answer. For example, a gray Angora cat plans to climb through the window and eat the little bird who is the heroine of the story. Margalo is warned and flies away; but we never learn
what happened to the cat when she prowled through the house at night. We never learn what happened to Stuart as he pursued his search for Margalo: did he ever find her? Did he return to his family? Mr. White has a tendency to write
amusing scenes instead of telling a story. To say that "Stuart Little" is one of the best children's books published this year is very modest praise for a writer of his talent.